Amory Lovins

Cofounder and Chairman Emeritus

Emerging Solutions

Physicist Amory Lovins (1947), FRSA, is Cofounder and Chairman Emeritus of Rocky Mountain Institute; energy advisor to major firms and governments in 65+ countries for 40+ years; author of 31 books and more than 600 papers; and an integrative designer of superefficient buildings, factories, and vehicles.

He has received the Blue Planet, Volvo, Zayed, Onassis, Nissan, Shingo, and Mitchell Prizes, the MacArthur and Ashoka Fellowships, the Happold, Benjamin Franklin, and Spencer Hutchens Medals, 12 honorary doctorates, and the Heinz, Lindbergh, Right Livelihood (“alternative Nobel”), National Design, and World Technology Awards. In 2016, the President of Germany awarded him the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz 1. Klasse).

A Harvard and Oxford dropout, former Oxford don, honorary US architect, and Swedish engineering academician, he has taught at ten universities, most recently Stanford’s Engineering School and the Naval Postgraduate School (but only on topics he’s never studied, so as to retain beginner’s mind). He served in 2011–18 on the National Petroleum Council. Time has named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people, and Foreign Policy, one of the 100 top global thinkers. His latest books include Natural Capitalism (1999, www.natcap.org), Small Is Profitable (2002, www.smallisprofitable.org), Winning the Oil Endgame (2004, www.oilendgame.com), The Essential Amory Lovins (2011), and Reinventing Fire (2011, www.reinventingfire.com).

His main recent efforts include supporting RMI’s collaborative synthesis, for China’s National Development and Reform Commission, of an ambitious efficiency-and-renewables trajectory that informed the 13th Five Year Plan; helping the Government of India design transformational mobility; and exploring how to make integrative design the new normal, so investments to energy efficiency can yield expanding rather than diminishing returns.

Authored Works

Never before, say shell-shocked oil traders, has the world price of crude oil fallen so far. Well, not since the early 1980s, anyway. Or was it 2008? Or 2014? Look at the 50-year history: World oil consumption vs. real crude-oil price, 1970–2019… Starting at the lower left, this roller-coaster…

This simple, practical guide offers a transparent way to compare the climate-effectiveness of different ways to provide electrical services—specifically, different ways to displace coal-fired electricity. Its worked examples show manyfold to over 50-fold differences in “Climate Effectiveness” (carbon saved per dollar spent) between common options, depending on their relative emissions…

America’s auto industry was doing great. In 2016, its sales rose for the seventh year running to record highs. In 2017, sales slipped 1.2 percent but remained among the top five in history, dominated by more-profitable pickups and SUVs. But now a salvo of assaults from the White House “so…

As the U.S. electricity sector awaits the release of a Department of Energy study assessing the impact of current market design on baseload generation and grid reliability, Rocky Mountain Institute’s Cofounder and Chief Scientist, Amory B. Lovins, has outlined and debunked in a soon-to-be-published Electricity Journal article 14 claimed…

For more detail on the topics covered in this article, readers should see Amory Lovins’ FERC comments, a recent article on Forbes, and a forthcoming article in The Electricity Journal. In April, U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry announced a 60-day study on electricity market design…